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20 Ways To Profit With E-Books

by Priya Shah

My habit of collecting every free e-book I could lay my hands proved very profitable to me while building my business.

Here are 20 ways that you can use free e-books to boost your profits.

1. Build Your List

Use free e-books as an incentive to get more people to join your list.

2. Keep Your Subscribers

Give away a new free e-book every time you mail your list or at least every month, so they have a reason to stay subscribed. Create a subscribers-only e-book library and keep adding new ones often.

3. Get More Affiliates to Promote Your Product

Offer free and rebradable e-books as an incentive for join your affiliate program.

4. Sell Customization Rights to Your Own E-Books

If you've written an e-book and have a number of affiliate links in it, you can make more money by selling the customization rights.

5. Back-End Profits

Purchase customization rights to other e-books and give them away free to your list. Profit when they purchase something through your links.

6. Become an Instant 'Expert'

Write an e-book on a topic that you know well and give it away to a target market. Once people know you as an expert on your subject, they will be more willing to spend money with you.

7. Grow Your Downline

Offer free e-books as an incentive to join a program under you. Allow your downline to give away the e-books as well so they can build their (and your) downline.

8. Become a Leader

Train your team by giving away free e-books that help them learn how to build their business. E-books help you save on the cost of ordering printed copies and shipping them to your distributors.

9. Boost Your Website Traffic

Write an e-book yourself and insert your website links in a way that gives your readers a compelling reason to visit your website, either for the resources you offer or an invitation to download more e-books.

10. Survey Your List

Have a great idea for a new product or e-book, but need to find out if there's a market for it? Create a survey and use free e-books to entice people to respond. To ensure a good response to your survey, offer two or more e-books, or a product that you own, or even a download of the product you plan to create as a result of the survey.

11. Get Viral

Give away a free e-book that others can brand with their own links so they will give it away eagerly to their own lists. Include your own affiliate program, or traffic exchange programs, or two-tier or multi-tier affiliate programs that readers can join through your links, to get most from this strategy.

12. Get Free Advertising

Give away a free e-book that hasn't been circulated much or one of your own products or e-books to e-zine editors in exchange for free ads in their e-zine.

13. Get Joint Venture Partners

Make your JV offer more attractive by offering your partners a valuable or unique e-book that you own or have the right to give away.

14. Build Link Popularity

Get others to link to your website by offering them free e-books or one of your own products. The more links you have pointing to your website, the higher you will rank on search engines and the more traffic you will get.

15. Promote Your Own Products

Offer free preview versions (say, the first few chapters) of an e-book that you wrote to promote it and get more people to buy it from you. Combine this with a rebrander to get a viral effect and increase downloads of your preview version. If you are selling a software product, give away a free report that explains why your software solves your target market's problem and how it will benefit them.

16. Enhance the Value of Your Product

Give away free e-books as bonus products along with your own product to enhance its value. This works best if the bonuses are related to the topic of the product you are selling.

17. Keep in Touch with Your Customers

Send your customers free e-books often to show them you value their business and remind them of your products in a way they won't object to.

18. Get Testimonials

Offer free e-books or bonuses to existing customers in exchange for testimonials that you can put up on your sales page.

19. Boost Flagging Sales

When sales are low, create an e-book with discount coupons or special offers and give them away to your customers. You can also use this strategy to boost holiday sales.

20. Revive Your Old Articles

Update or rewrite old articles or sections of your e-zine archives and compile them into an e-book to give them a new lease of life.

Priya Shah runs blogging courses at BlogBrandz and is the author of Number One In Your Niche.

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